Whenever I am asked this question, I can’t help but think of the punchline to a joke that was once supposed to be funny but would now be considered beyond the pale in all respects, so I won’t repeat it. The punch line is: “Just lucky, I guess.” That’s the short answer to why we gastroenterologists work in our field. Despite the distasteful aspect of human waste and the perverse …
Doctor, why do you enjoy practicing gastroenterology?
I nearly died a month ago on a treadmill halfway through a stress test.
The short story is this: I had just gone to bed and was about to go to sleep when I started to have some chest pain that I told myself was just my usual heartburn, only worse. As a gastroenterologist, I knew better. It was bad enough that I couldn’t go to sleep. After two sleepless hours …
Al Franken, the humorist-turned-senator, once published a book that was titled “Oh, the Things I Know!” Indeed, by the time we reach parenthood, it is truly amazing what we keep up there in that attic of a brain.
Here is a brief selection of things about the practice of medicine that I have had to discover for myself or never quite figured out, including clinical pearls, aphorisms, dictums, platitudes, mysteries and …
Clinical pearls that you don’t learn during medical training
I read a few months ago that the number of available iPhone apps had exceeded a million, with new apps now appearing that are intended to help sort through the mountain of other apps. We have reached the age of meta-apps. Parenthetically, I have always loved that “meta”concept. In college, when people asked why I majored in philosophy despite the fact that I was pre-med, I explained that my intention was to become …
7 iPhone apps that need to be created for doctors
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